On December 23 the Oxford Waits gave their annual Christmas concert. This is a splendid finale to the series of refined carol services in the various college chapels; a more rousing, not to say raucous, way of celebrating the season could hardly be imagined.

The Waits' chosen period is 17th-century Oxford; the five performers are dressed accordingly and, since they all sing and play several instruments, create the effect of many more. Their leader, Tim Healey, splendidly declaims ballads and diary entries from the period, heavily relying on Anthony à Wood, Oxford's gloriously batty and unpredictable answer to Evelyn and Pepys (though the former also turns up in a delightful extract describing his arrest during the Commonwealth for ("praying for Charles Stuart").

Fascinating, in the light of our worries about climate change, are descriptions of the various brief 'ice-ages' during the 17th century - in 1684 "a coach and six horses drove upon the ice", and, while Anthony à Wood's "bottle of ink froze at the fireside", it turned out that the officials of St Clements had shifted the body of a frozen drunk over Magdalen Bridge to save the parish a few shillings (this latter touchingly accompanied by a contemporary tune, Christmas Lamentation). More cheerful was News from the River Thames, describing an earlier freeze-up of 1610, in which the delightful soprano (and Baroque violinist) Caroline Butler was accompanied by the lutenist Edward Fitzgibbon and Charles Spicer on flute.

We were reminded that the Cromwellians actually succeeded in abolishing Christmas in a hysterically funny extract from The Anatomie of Abuses by Philip Stubbs, a specially neurotic Puritan of the 1650s, and celebrated its return after the Restoration with baritone (and war-drum player) Ian Giles in Blanket Fair. The atmosphere was so lively that the audience seemed disappointed to be joining in only two rounds - but we gave our all in Banbury Ale and Great Tom is Cast.